alt Hacker NewsWhen Claude Code subscriptions really started to catch on, there was a popular idea on HN that Anthropic's end game was that basically every dev adjacent role would need to pay for a $200/mo coding plan.
Then, both Anthropic and OpenAI in lockstep developed a enterprise pricing structure that openly coerced large businesses to pay API prices where it was feasible to spend $200/day rather than the comparatively cheap $200/mo.
Even if token pricing relative to intelligence does trend down over time, that doesn't mean the pricing structure will actually translate to lower costs, particularly in the cash cow B2B market.
Replies
xyzsparetimexyz • yesterday at 5:57 AM
Its insane, I don't possibly understand how they convinced companies to pay 30x
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The API/subscription split as always there. I don’t know why you’re talking about it as a bait-and-switch development.
That doesn’t change anything about what I said, though. The relative price per task or price per unit intelligence is also going down in the APIs too.
> Even if token pricing relative to intelligence does trend down over time, that doesn't mean the pricing structure will actually translate to lower costs, particularly in the cash cow B2B market.
What are you talking about? The APIs serve the same models as the subscriptions. Unless you think the price of APIs has been going up (it has not) this argument doesn’t make sense